Quantitative easing as free money creation - to subsidize the big
banks
The Federal Reserve’s
three waves of Quantitative Easing since 2008 show how easy it is to create free
money. Yet this has been provided only to the largest banks, not to strapped
homeowners or industry. An immediate $2 trillion in “cash for trash” took the form of the Fed creating new
bank-reserve credit in exchange for mortgage-backed securities valued far above
market prices. QE2 provided another $800 billion in 2011-12. The banks used this
injection of credit for interest rate arbitrage and
exchange rate speculation on the currencies of Brazil, Australia and other
high-interest-rate economies. So nearly all the Fed’s new
money went abroad rather than being lent out for investment or employment at
home.
Fiscal deflation on top of debt deflation
The main financial problem with funding war occurs after the return
to normalcy, when creditors press for budget surpluses to roll back the public
debt that has been run up. This imposes fiscal austerity, reducing wages and
commodity prices relative to the debts that
are owed. Consumer spending shrinks and prices decline as governments spend
less, while higher taxes withdraw revenue. This is what is occurring in
today’s financial war, much as it has in past
military postwar returns to peace.
Governments have the power to resist this deflationary policy. Like
commercial banks, they can create money on their computer keyboards. Indeed,
since 2008 the government has created debt to support the Finance, Insurance and
Real Estate (FIRE) sector more than the “real”
production and consumption economy.
In contrast to public spending for goods and services (or social programs that increase market demand), most of the bank credit that led to the 2008 financial collapse was created to finance the purchase property already in place, stocks and bonds already issued, or companies already in existence.
The effect has been to load down the economy with mortgages, bonds
and bank debt whose carrying charges eat into spending on current output. The
$13 trillion bank subsidy since 2008 (to enable banks to earn their
way out of negative equity) brings us back to the question of why taxes
should be levied on the 99% to pre-save for Social Security and Medicare, but
not for the bank bailout.
Current tax policy encourages financial and rent extraction that has
become the major economic problem of our epoch. Industrial productivity
continues to rise, but debt is growing even more inexorably. Instead of fueling
economic growth, this of credit/debt threatens to absorb the economic surplus,
plunging the economy into austerity, debt deflation and negative equity.
So despite the fact that the financial system is broken, it has gained control over public policy to sustain and even obtain tax favoritism for a dysfunctional overgrowth of bank credit. Unlike the progress of science and technology, this debt is not part of nature. It is a social construct.
The financial sector has politicized it by pressing to privatize economic rent rather than collect it as the tax base. This financialization of rent-extracting opportunities does not reflect a natural or inevitable evolution of “the market”. It is a capture of market structures and fiscal policy.
Bank lobbyists have campaigned to shift the economic arena to the
political sphere of lawmaking and tax policy, with side battlegrounds in the
mass media and universities to capture the hearts and
minds of voters to believe that the quickest and most efficient way to build up
wealth is by bank credit and debt leverage.
* This article is a
small section of a comprehensive analysis by Michael Hudson called
America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff - Analysis.
Read the entire article here.
http://www.eurasiareview.com/30122012-americas-deceptive-2012-fiscal-cliff-analysis/
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